Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction: Girls’ Own Stories

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.

Jeannette King is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Publications include: Discourses ofAgeing in Fiction and Feminism: (2012), The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005), Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (2000), and Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (1978).